American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
9 episodes written by Tom Rob Smith
The FX Channel
A FRESH POLAROID of fashion icon Gianni Versace dying on a rickety gurney is to be sold to the highest bidder, starting at $30,000. An eager “fan” tears a page from Versace magazine and splotches it with Gianni’s fresh blood. The second season of American Crime Story (ACS), “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” takes us in nine episodes through the sequence of events that led to the murder of Versace at the hands of one Andrew Cunanan, a serial killer who had managed to insinuate his way into the designer’s orbit. Much of the narrative is about the murderer’s back story and how it led to that fateful moment in South Beach in 1997.
ACS does away with the usual stereotypical gay characters, such as that of the perverse villain or the token comic character, and offers instead a diverse array of three-dimensional human beings. The plot is structured around the contrasting lives of the two central characters, protagonist Gianni Versace, played by Edgar Ramirez, and villain Andrew Cunanan, played by Darren Criss.
Cunanan is the epitome of the “complicated person.” He is charming, driven, calculating, and handsome—but also untrustworthy, unstable, and vengeful. His back story includes his privileged upbringing followed by his father’s vehement rejection of his homosexuality, leaving home, and facing a life of poverty, homelessness, and sex work. He escapes that life, but not without bitterness and rage. One weapon he discovers early on is the value of threatening to bring other people’s gay identities to light. This form of intimidation starts small, such as when he “accidentally” mails a flirtatious note to the parents of his unrequited love interest, Jeff, who isn’t out to his parents. Later, he ups the ante all the way to murder. After bludgeoning Jeff to death, he takes Jeff’s lover David hostage and persuades David to run away with him. He does this by convincing David that the police would assume him to be an accomplice in Jeff’s murder.
In another incident, Cunanan ties up a client and nearly chokes him to death, but the client declines to report the assault because he’s ashamed of the circumstances surrounding it. Cunanan would murder several of his clients, who had in common that they were closeted homosexuals. As in the case of business tycoon Lee Miglin, Cunanan’s MO was to scatter gay pornography around his corpse, as if to mock the victim’s secrecy as a gay man. Cunanan killed four men before Versace, but the world turned a blind eye so long as he only killed “nobody gays,” in the words of a friend. The manhunt didn’t become serious until Andrew killed a “celebrity gay.”
Throughout the series, various other gay characters are also shown to be hidden away in some sense. Versace’s boyfriend of fifteen years, Antonio D’Amico (played by Ricky Martin), was presumed to be Gianni’s assistant until they finally took the relationship public—against the wishes of Gianni’s sister, Donatella. The identity of Cunanan’s love interest Jeff is withheld from viewers when we first meet him as a silhouette in a documentary about closeted gay people in the military. As a devoted soldier, Jeff’s climb up the military ranks had come to a screeching halt after suspicions about his sexuality arose.
A number of gay issues are sprinkled through the show, such as school bullying, the AIDS and crystal meth epidemics, pedophilic priests targeting gay youths, the acceptance of “gay panic” as an excuse to commit murder, and even discrimination within the gay community (as when Donatella accuses Gianni of sexism, and when a gay escort agency upholds the beauty standard of “no fats, no fems, no Asians”). Jeff’s suicide attempt reminds us that LGBT youth are three times more likely to contemplate suicide than their heterosexual peers, according to the Trevor Project.
In time, Cunanan begins to cultivate an anonymous life, having gone from an unabashed, privileged child in the limelight to a broken young man lost in his father’s lies and abandonment. As an unhinged adult, he does a hack job of smothering himself with duct tape in a cheap hotel bathroom. Later on, he attempts to regain control over his identity by changing it at whim. At one point a friend tells him: “You tell gay people you’re gay and straight people you’re straight.”
In Cunanan’s final act on ACS, viewers are brought back to a tense moment between him and Versace while backstage at the opera. Versace pushes away Cunanan’s kiss, imploring him to be nourished by art rather than the acceptance of others. Cunanan lives his life as if all the world were a stage, acting cool when people are watching but, in private, meticulously piecing together the outfit for his next disguise. While he’s standing alone onstage, the lights go off, leaving him in the dark once again, a scene that’s juxtaposed with his suicide after the police surround his hideout.
Cunanan’s murder of Versace was probably an act of revenge for the designer’s rejection of him—the last straw after a string of rejections. In killing Versace, Cunanan revealed his own shame in being attracted to him, in being a toy in other people’s lives, and in being one of the many people anxiously waiting their turn outside the ornate gates of Versace’s mansion—so close and yet so far away.
Cheyenne Dorsagno is a journalist and essayist based in Utica, New York. She specializes in film and cultural criticism.
